REVIEWS:

From the NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (7/23/2017):​"A Novel Looks Back at a Women's Idealistic Days in the Spanish Civil War"

Mary Gordon is the bard of the American Catholic experience. She’s preternaturally talented, but her reputation has been unfairly shadowed by certain assumptions about Catholicism — in other words, that Philip Larkin was right about religion being a “vast moth-eaten musical brocade.”I’ve felt a kinship with Larkin ever since I stumbled on his 1974 collection “High Windows” in my high school library and sat transfixed, reading the title poem. As a cradle Catholic who has lapsed and returned more times than I care to consider, I have a special need for his elegiac asperity when it comes to lost faith. Yet I also learned that Catholicism was nothing to be ashamed of from the avant-garde film critic P. Adams Sitney, the first intellectual Catholic I had the great luck to study with. If a man who helped found the Anthology Film Archives and counted the groundbreaking director Jonas Mekas as a friend sincerely believed that Christ rose from the dead, maybe I could watch the resurrection of the wife in Carl Dreyer’s “Ordet” with credulous wonder after all. (Read more...)

From America Magazine (6/26/2017):It is 1936 and Marian, a freshman at Vassar, finds her brother, Johnny, hanging from a rope in the apartment that he shares with his lover. The occasion further disrupts Marian’s relationship with the Roman Catholic Church and becomes the defining moment of Marian’s life—and of this novel.

There Your Heart Lies follows Marian’s attempts to come to grips with the loss of her brother. She blames her father, her siblings, society and the Catholic Church, whose rigidity, she believes, influenced her father to try to “cure” Johnny of his homosexuality and thereby “save his soul.” (Read more...)

From the Minneapolis StarTribune (6/23/2017):Mary Gordon’s first novel, “Final Payments,” was published to great acclaim in 1978, when she was 28 years old, and she has been a literary voice to contend with ever since.In her oeuvre, which includes 11 works of fiction as well as essays, memoirs, a biography of Joan of Arc and reflections on “Reading Jesus,” there is often a clear tension between those institutions and systems of belief that frame a life — religious, political, familial — and the demands and impulses of the solitary self — for instance, moral, intellectual and sexual. (Read more...)

OPRAH CHOOSES THERE YOUR HEART LIES AS A BEST BOOK TO READ THIS MONTH:

A satirical novel predicts a win for Luddites. Look for the common threads in Mary Gordon's fiction since her 1978 debut, Final Payments, and you'll discern the entwined strands of earthly and spiritual passion. Her radiant latest, There Your Heart Lies, revisits this theme, but with the rich maturity of a writer who grasps that destiny is shaped by geography, politics and circumstance.

Gordon's protagonist, American heiress Marian Taylor, defies her status-conscious Manhattan parents by enlisting as a nurse during the Spanish Civil War. The novel then shifts back and forth between Marian's early storm of adventures—the carnage she witnesses on the battlefield, the men she loves—and Rhode Island in 2009. Now in her 90s, Marian is pressed by her granddaughter, Amelia, to retrieve her long-submerged history, memories she thought she'd buried for good. "The past," Gordon writes, "doesn't come to her in a line, or even a series of images that can fit together to make a satisfying whole. Each image comes to her separately, like the bubbles in a pan of boiling water."

In her previous work, the interplay of the erotic and the religious (Gordon as a child had considered becoming a nun, and Catholicism occupies a central role in her fiction and nonfiction) has inspired, even empowered, her female characters. But fear and dread shadow Marian near the end of her days, and only the presence of her granddaughter, the person Marian loves most in the world, with her "lovely face, always with a hint of puzzlement or surprise, like an animal lifting its head after drinking in a stream, startled," softens that pain. For Amelia, the voyage into her grandmother's life rounds out a sense of identity she hadn't even realized was incomplete. It's a bond we feel, too, as Gordon journeys deep into the hearts and minds of women, still yearning, even at the last. — Hamilton Cain

THERE YOUR HEART LIES NOTED INTHE NEW YORKER MAGAZINE (6/19/2017):​When a young woman breaks with her wealthy East Coast Catholic family to fight against Franco in the Spanish Civil War, she arrives with little beyond “the vague ideas of a privileged girl.” This novel toggles between her years in Spain, bringing up a child she has with a Spanish doctor, and the memories she shares, in her nineties, back in America, with a granddaughter. The latter scenes lack the eventfulness of the Spanish ones, which are full of rich details, such as the scent of oranges on a hospital worker who has scavenged for food in the street. The novel’s preoccupations are the tension between faith and doctrine, and the justification of atrocity in the name of religion.

COMMONWEAL MAGAZINE REVIEWS THERE YOUR HEART LIES:​History, art, politics, even botany: Mary Gordon’s fiction infuses all of these things—and so much more—with the intensity of religious experience.

This can be taken to ghastly extremes, as in Gordon’s powerful 2005 novel Pearl. In that story, the daughter of a thoroughly assimilated, lapsed Catholic goes to Ireland to study linguistics. In the wake of Ireland’s Good Friday peace agreements of 1998, the once-apolitical title character ends up going on a hunger strike and chaining herself to a flagpole. (read more...)